Magento Home Page Design For Your Market

 

Let’s work out how we are going to use your Magento site to actually sell stuff. Thousands of Magento sites get built every day and I think many of them fall flat on their face because they don’t understand how to sell. Let’s make sure your site is the best it can be.

Firstly before you even start marketing your site you have to REALLY understand what your customer wants. Not what he needs or what he “thinks” he wants but actually what he wants. Let me explain the difference. Millions of dollars have been poured into surveys over the years asking people what they want and what they like, but we now know that people always tell you what they think is the right answer rather than the real answer. Often they do not actually know the real answer.

Ask a heavy drinker if they think they drink too much and the answer will be no.

Ask an obese person if they have a healthy diet and they will often consider their diet ‘not too bad’. Then put all the food in front of them that they have eaten in the last week and they will get a shock.

Ask a parent if their child is a good child and even if they are an absolute monster they will say ‘yes’.

So how can we find out what people actually want? I think the best place to look is on a tool like Keyword Spy which shows you the best adverts on Google Adwords for each search term. I like to look for adverts that have been running a long time, meaning that someone is pumping a lot of money into them and thus it must make them money right? Then I write down the main aspects I see in the top five adverts like this

5 mention free delivery

4 mention low pricing

1 mentions ‘award-winning’

And so on. Then I look at the landing pages that the adverts take people to and make further notes like

4 have a picture of young women

5 push security of an online purchase

Etc.

From this, I can quickly understand the main factors that I am going to have to use before I start marketing. Also, I look at the general price and see if I can compete.

I am amazed at how many people don’t go through this basic process and I guess it will never change. So take advantage of their laziness and DO THIS WORK!

I also want you to understand the buyer types that are going to be visiting your store. I have read hundreds of books on personality typing and buyer profiling and I can save you a lot of time on this as most of it is very hard to find practical uses for. The buyer types are

Fast Purchasers:

Competitive – like to be the best and want the best.  Make buying decisions quickly and buy by brand or by quality. Think alpha male/female.

Spontaneous – buys on a whim and is swayed by sale or home page items. Makes a purchase quickly. Information needed to make a quick decision and they are happy to buy. Think shopaholic or boring essential purchase.

Slow Purchasers:

Methodical – takes longer to buy and fully researches a purchase. Takes time to review the whole site and also other websites before buying. Think boring accountant.

Humanistic – buys based on how the purchase will affect other people.  They are also concerned about how their purchases are seen and used by their family and friends. They take longer to buy. Think touchy feely.

When I first learnt about buyer types I got confused as I thought person A was always buyer type X. This is not the case; a person will change buyer type depending on what they are buying. E.g. when you buy a loaf of bread you will buy differently than when buying a car. So what you have to sell will affect the buyer types to target.

How can you find out what buyer types you have?

The simplest way is to work out if people buy quickly or slowly on your Magento site. In a second I will show you how to do this using your Google Analytics data.

If you are new website then you are going to have to study your competitors and see what’s at the top of their home pages, as opposed to the bottom, fast buyer types are targeted at the top, slow buyer types further down. Slow buyers take time and are more likely to scroll down the page.

If you have Google Analytics then here are some things to look out for

Visits to purchase – the majority of your purchases will come from the visitors first visit BUT if 50% or more of your purchasers take more than one visit to buy then main buyers types are either humanistic or methodical

If the visits to purchase are 80% first visit then it is likely you have a spontaneous buyer.

If the time to purchase is mostly less than one day then you are looking at spontaneous or competitive shoppers.

If social media is a big referring source of traffic for you or your competitors then these buyers will tend towards the humanistic type.

You should have a good idea of your market and understand the buyer from customer phone calls, customer enquiries and social media interaction. From your own experience with your customer, you should be able to see which of the buyer types you have the most of. Do they buy fast or slow, are they methodical and spontaneous.

Every buyer regardless of the type still goes through a sales cycle when they make a purchase. But the buyer type will indicate whether they zip through the cycle or go slow. The sales cycle is broken down into the following steps:

Research, Analysis and Comparison, Buying, Post Buying.

Two factors affect where your visitor is along this sales cycle when they visit your Magento site, the first one is:

How much knowledge visitors have of the product.

The lower the knowledge the closer to the start they will be. For example, you are selling ‘home safes’ the visitors are likely to be in research mode when they hit your Magento store. Few people will have purchased ‘home safes’ before and need to be educated before they can buy.

On the other hand, if someone is buying a table lamp they are likely to understand enough about table lamps to make a purchase and will likely land on the website in the ‘Analysis and Comparison’ step of the sales cycle.

Finally, if you are selling ‘home cinema systems’ online often the buyer will know exactly what model they want and will visit the website in ‘buyer mode’.

Let’s look at what to put on your home page based on the sales cycle stage a visitor comes to your Magento site.

i) Research phase – the furthest away from purchase so you should push free guides on how to make an educated decision. Encourage data capture in return for ‘free reports’. Use remarketing cookies to remarket to them for a long time after their visit. Maybe a ‘wizard’ on how to choose the right product. For consumer sites competitions are also good to push to people in research mode.

ii) Analysis and Comparison phase – midway from purchase. Now the focus moves to show why people should buy from your Magento store rather than someone else. This is where you should push your unique selling points such as customer satisfaction scores, product awards, beautiful imagery, sales copy. Make sure that you would want to buy from you if you made a purchase of the product you sold – be honest! (Everyone always gets stuck with unique selling points, but it gets easier if you write down three points instead of one – try them and see if the customer cares.)

iii) Buying phase – right before the purchase. The visitor is going to know exactly what they want and they want it now. So delivery cost, as well as speed of delivery, is important. Also if your product is not unique then price is going to be very important. If everyone offers the same price then use gifts with purchase, cash back or anything to give an edge. Having a Magento site where visitors land for the first time in buying phase is one of the most competitive areas.

Don’t forget the ‘post buying’ sales cycle stage as this is when ‘buyer’s remorse’ can kick in. This hits my wife hugely when she makes a big purchase. Neglecting this stage will affect the repeat purchase frequency of existing customers, so think about the pages on your Magento site that buyers visit after they have made a purchase and reassure them they have made the correct choice.A good way to combat buyer’s remorse is to include a free gift that was not mentioned in the sales process, as it makes them happy when the remorse is strongest.

The 2nd factor that affects where the visitor is on the sales cycle when they visit your site is

 

How expensive the product is compared to how much money they have.

 

If it’s a BIG purchase for them then they are much more likely to move through the steps slowly.

If the buyer is in the research phase AND this is a BIG purchase then I would recommend moving to a more of a lead generation website with which the primary focus of the site is to generate sales leads that can be followed up instead of going for the sale first. You can stay in contact during the long sales process and remarket to them when they are ready to buy.

The only other thing to consider is aesthetics. Are your products bought because of the way they look or are they purely functional? If people are buying gifts or clothing then aspirational imagery is going to be very important. The imagery should conjure up a lifestyle for the visitor to buy into. If people are buying car parts like brake pads then the imagery should show functional parts like fittings clearly. Imagery is important on any Magento site and should be professionally done.

Let’s take what we have talked about above and apply it to some of the sites I have worked with. Have a look at these sites online.

1. (www.coxandcox.co.uk) Cox & Cox is a home decorations Magento store, selling accessories like candles, cushions and decorative items.

The website is designed for spontaneous and humanistic buyer types through the use of beautiful inspirational imagery and reviews on most products. The buyer visits the website in the ‘analysis and comparison’ phase wanting a purchase for a ‘bedroom gift’ or ‘something to tidy my kitchen cupboards up with’.They will not know exactly what they are looking for but once they find it will quickly take the next step. For the spontaneous buyers, this next step will be to make a purchase. For the humanistic buyers, this will be to read the reviews in depth and start to hone in on what’s most relevant for them. So on the initial pages, we have imagery to aid ‘analysis’ but once you get into the products the ‘buyer stage’ information like delivery and pricing is clearly displayed on each product.Also, we make it easy for the humanistic buyer to share the product on Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook.

The customer’s knowledge of product is fairly high so they will be confident and the % of disposable income is going to be fairly low. Because of that, there is a small amount of product description next to large images and the product is sold largely by the look and feel of the imagery on the site.

2. (www.diamond-rings.co.nz) Global Diamonds sell Engagement rings.

This is a good example of a site where the buyers is often at the beginning of the sales cycle and this is a BIG purchase for them, so as mentioned above capturing a prospect’s email is going to be the main task for the Magento site.

Often it is a guy buying for his future finance and he may not have bought jewellery before and he will be very nervous. So with a product like engagement rings, you have to do things in a different way. You are not going to get a spontaneous purchase. You will probably have people coming to the site multiple times getting educated and building trust. So what you’ll see on this site is a lot of background information.

Thinking about the buyer types you are going to get a mixture of

*Competitive – the buyer wants to know they are getting the best for their money. In this market offers like ‘Get 50% Off’ do not work as well as ‘Get twice the size of diamond for your money’.People approach the purchase with a maximum budget and want to get the best ring possible with this. They are less concerned with saving money, as with getting more for their money.

Given email address capture is important at the bottom of this Magento site is a guide of the 8 mistakes to avoid when buying a ring. Data capture is pushed hard at the top because we know it will take people several visits to decide to buy a ring. There is also a lot of confidential information like the lifetime guarantee, there is the social proof of over 7,000 handmade rings sold (which actually would be better as a specific number rather than over 7,000 as a specific number is more believable) and finance options available because of the high % spend to disposable income. So this site is quite different from the previous example.

For a site like this driving people straight away to make a purchase online would not work. Even when I handled the marketing for the largest chain of jewellery shops in the UK, people did not buy engagement rings online – so going for an email address to follow up with is key!

3. (www.gsfcarparts.co.uk) GSF Carparts.They sell car parts. The buyer is going to have ‘some’ knowledge of the product i.e.what an oil filter is but not necessarily the exact oil filter for their car nor the benefits from choosing a premium product. The % of disposable income will be quite low.

This site is about putting people straight in front of the product they want to buy with nothing getting in the way of that. So we have a registration look-up that shows the right parts for their car. What’s hard on this site is that usually there are several parts available for each car model and sometimes without extra help, this gets very confusing. So we are constantly improving information on how to choose the right part, we also offer live help and any further work in this area will continue to increase revenue of this site. Showing clearly which part is the ‘best’ one for your car is the battle that needs to be won. For a site like this, there is always an improvement to be made on how people find the right product as there are over 50,000 products! So building feedback data around this will help, such as

*Logging what the conversion rate is for certain car searches

*Logging when searches for certain cars return no results

*Making sure the Magento search redirect people to the right pages (Magento search out of the box is commonly known to be rubbish)

After finding which part fits their car then it needs to be very simple to make that purchase.

4. (www.brooktaverner.co.uk) Brook Taverner. They sell men’s suits and men’s tailoring.

Prospects coming to the site obviously know what a suit is and have probably bought one before. What’s new to most of them is that this might be the first time they have bought a suit online. So the hurdle is going to convincing the buyer to buy a suit online. This means overcoming the main objections such as ‘what if it does not fit’, ‘what if the colour looks different in reality compared to the product photo’ etc. The pricing on these suits means the % of disposable income will be mid-range for their target market.

Given the above, the buyer is most likely landing on the site during the Analysis and Comparison Phase and given that many of them have not bought a suit online before this pushes them to take more time over their purchase and we are going to have a lot of methodical buyer types.

However, since a suit is an ‘aspirational purchase’ before the buyer gets methodical we have to get their interest and desire primed by having awesome product images. Prospects will only move on the other objections such as fit or delivery if they desire the suit. You can buy a suit from many places so pricing and offers are important.

Once you know where what your visitors are looking for you can work out how much education you need and how much room for spontaneity you need.  Things like ties or knitwear could be used for quick purchases and jackets and suits for more involved purchases. They also have deals for existing customers to encourage them back to the site repeatedly.

Data Capture

It is very important to get data capture on your home page. Especially if you’ve got a product which prospects take a long time to decide upon. On retail site you can use competitions, Facebook and offers to grab a person’s email address. Do a lot of activities to grab email addresses on a visitor’s first visit so that you can remarket to them over and over again. As mentioned before spontaneous buyers stay at the top of the page and methodical buyers and take longer to buy get to the bottom of the page and that’s why the Facebook and competition links are at the bottom to reach those shoppers, who haven’t made a spontaneous purchase and capture their details.

So that’s a good overview of where your Magento home page needs to be depending on the buyer types and sales cycle. Don’t rely on design agencies to understand these points (as most I have met have no idea!), it is up to you the business owner to work it out and communicate the design brief. This will be key to how you pitch your products because your homepage will lead the website and lead the sales and that will flow into the rest of the site.

Bounce rate IS important anything over 50% and you have a problem. Your sites first impression is important.